At present, it is a known fact that a radio and TV signal digital information services transmission or broadcast operator can broadcast the digital TV and radio channels via a TV transport network based on satellite, cable, digital terrestrial, etc. to a group of end subscribers of the digital service broadcast system.
The audiovisual contents and information associated with radio and TV services are produced or collected in a head end, where they are compressed, multiplexed and adapted to the transport network, which will carry them to the end users.
Consequently, the distribution of digital radio and TV signals in accordance with standards such as MPEG, DVB and ATSC enables end customers to access TV services that are generally of a higher quality than equivalent TV services provided via analog TV services.
However, if the quality of the stream recovered or decoded in a customer device from a digital data stream received from the head end does not exceed a predetermined quality threshold, the consequences are worse than in an equivalent situation in the analog system, i.e., an audiovisual receiver connected to the customer device shows a screen with a distorted signal, black screen or screen without signal when a decoder of the customer device cannot decode the received data transport stream and/or it supplies an incomplete decoded stream as a result of the fact that not all data packets of the transport stream are received by the customer device decoder.
The aforesaid drawback affects all kinds of broadcast technologies, e.g. via cable, via satellite and terrestrial, and it is especially noticeable in the case of the broadcast of digital terrestrial television (DTT).
American patent application US 2010/0050042 A1, included herein for reference, refers to a TV broadcast procedure based on an Internet IPTV protocol which combines techniques of forward error correction with techniques of retransmission to handle lost and/or corrupted data packets associated with digital multimedia channels broadcast over an Internet IP protocol-based telecommunications network.
In the procedure referred to above, the end customers receive the channels with digital multimedia audiovisual contents over an IP network.
However, the aforesaid drawback is still not eliminated and/or diminished in the event that the audiovisual contents are broadcast via a transport network other than an IP network; for this scenario, the subscriber experience is inferior to the experience of a subscriber of an analog TV broadcast system.